In Hawaii for a personal vacation, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger voiced support for a part-time California legislature. “Spending so much time in Sacramento, without anything to do, then out of that comes strange bills... Give them a short period of time. Then good work gets done.”

Democratic lawmakers disagreed with the governor.

“If you make it part-time, I think you will get a group of people that are even less focused on real public policy,” said Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, a Democrat from Pittsburg.

Canciamilla explained that “the point now is, as a full-time legislature we can make these issues complicated. We can ensure that voters don’t have the time to understand the laws we create. Our last budget was over six hundred pages long, ensuring that voters cannot get in the way before our final vote. A part-time Legislature is not going to find it as easy to hide laws from the public.”

Lawmakers complained that voters who “think that they can understand laws” try to involve themselves in the political process. That makes it “more difficult for legislators to focus on real public policy.”

One lawmaker noted that they already had a hard enough time over-turning initiatives enacted by misguided voters.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco agreed, and added that he wished the governor were working harder on obfuscating political issues. “While I'm out here working on inserting special clauses for my favorite special interests... he’s pontificating from Hawaii? I could use some help here in Sacramento. We have a new budget due soon and we’re only on page 451. We have a ways to go if we want to match last year’s page count.”